What I've Been Reading: What you feed AI tools dictates content you get and Substack's deep-dives on community

What Reach's AI content tool Gutenbot signals for use of open AI to help content production and the tools for building online community as written by Substack.

Good afternoon,

The final Wednesday of February. This Substack is nearly at 100 subscribers so thanks to everyone who has taken the time to sign up and receive my digest each Wednesday afternoon on interesting links I’ve found. Speaking to one subscriber last week they said they appreciated the brevity and focus of just highlighting a couple of things and providing some insight around them.

Reach using AI to speed up ‘ripping’ and use same article on multiple sites - Bron Maher, Press Gazette - the UK's largest multimedia publisher has developed an in-house AI tool to allow content to be quickly shared between its titles, nothing actually new there as it's a system used by a number of publishers. What's crucial here is how increasingly we're seeing publishers developing their own in-house AI tools and training them. Why is this important? The quality of the content you'll get from open AI tools is dictated by a combo of the diet of content you feed it and also the prompts written. With the journalism innovation teaching I do for the University of Central Lancashire on a Tuesday afternoon we were fortunate enough to hear from my former colleague Paul Gallagher about how Gutenbot has been built and adapted - and the rigorous checks and balances put in place for the process. Although people point to ChatGPT etc, it's the under the hood custom builds where we'll see open AI acceleration for actually producing content come in the next 12-18 months. The risk of hallucinations and costly legal pitfalls re copyright mean using off-the-shelf tools anywhere online for AI content creation leave too many publishers exposed.

Paul also made a fantastic point for the student journalists, get used to working with an AI-assistant as that will become a standard part of the role in the months and years ahead.

Kickstarting Community at: Substack - Community Inc, Gareth Wilson - there’s a whole bunch of pieces from Gareth in his Community Inc series where he looks at how different organisations from Lego to Substack have built their community. There’s some good learnings in the Substack piece about creating that hyper-community around a writer and a publication, and crucially giving time for that bond to grow (it won’t be instant payback). Allowing readers, users, subscribers to feel that bond to a brand or an organisation, or a writer, is what will ultimately give them the connection and confidence to be able to part with money, or data, in return for the service they are receiving. Assuming that anonymous numbers in Google Analytics will convert into subscriptions is a difficult path to go down, you have to get inside your audience data and understand who are your community and loyal readers, and what they want. Well worth taking a look through Gareth’s very well organised archive of organisations and companies he’s done deep-dives on to find one which fits your context.

And not an interesting link as such but I popped in briefly for the Media Factory in Preston for the start of the Journalism Leadership and Innovation courses afternoon of talks and discussions about Finding Clarity in Chaos: News Leadership in a Disruptive Age.

I caught part of the discussion around young leaders navigating their way through the media, with Jon Birchall of LadBible, Rachel Arthur of Boom Saloon and Aliya Itzkowitz of FT Strategies. An interesting discussion that was grounded in getting to know your numbers, and getting to understand there will always be lots of things you don't know about so make sure there's smart people you can ask for the detail on those new things that are emerging (from new ways that programmatic advertising is operating through to TikTok's latest new feature). It’s great to see this programme - which I’ve been a part of - not just running as an insular course but also opening up to allow people to dial in and join the conversation too as part of it. Well done to everyone involved.

And my and finally this week, is I recently took part in a ‘five minutes with’ feature for InPublishing. They asked me all things audience, AI and more. Thanks to James and the team for getting in touch. If there’s anything that’s taken your interest and you think I can help with then I’m on ed@almaonline.co.uk

Hope everyone is having a good week. Keep going.

Ed